It began with a sudden silence.

Samuel had been speaking about the prophecy, discussing the divine grace possessed by the Cavendish brothers. Then abruptly, his voice and the movements of both men ceased.

Before Catherine could grasp what was happening, Samuel’s body collapsed like a marionette with cut strings. Before the startled Catherine could react, David’s arms, which had been firmly holding her, also fell limply.

Simultaneously raising her head, Catherine saw David’s empty, vacant eyes. Then she looked up, startled by a sound that suddenly broke the silence.

At first, she thought it was just the window rattling in the wind and rain. Looking at the pitch-black window, she initially believed nothing was visible because of the darkness.

She realized something was wrong immediately afterward.

The window appeared pitch-black not simply because it had grown dark outside.

The window shook violently. Countless hands pounded on it from outside. Pitch-black silhouettes clung to the window like barnacles. Their voices calling to Catherine continued endlessly.

“Catherine, Cathy, my Cat, Catherine, look at me, Catherine…”

Catherine stood alone before what looked like a massive wave of these beings. Frozen in place, even after partially regaining her senses several seconds later, she was too afraid to turn away, fearing they might break through the window.

Catherine watched as the countless hands outside struck the window with enough force to shatter it.

“Do not listen to the evil thing.”

Catherine maintained her sanity by recalling Saul’s warning. Ironically, this was because those voices calling her name continued unabated. With a body that barely responded to her commands, Catherine rose and slowly backed toward the door with dragging steps.

The louder the shadowy figures outside pounded on the window, the further Catherine moved away.

But she didn’t stop. Her gaze briefly fell on the two men remaining in the middle of the study, but only for an instant.

In that moment, Catherine had an inexplicable certainty: these things wanted only her and wouldn’t pursue those two men.

For this reason, Catherine fled the study without hesitation. Throughout her journey across the pitch-black corridor, she could think of nothing except escaping from them.

“I love you…!”

The voice, clinging like soot, persistently followed Catherine. She turned to avoid the sound. 

However, after walking quickly down the lightless corridor for some time, Catherine suddenly felt a strange sense of dissonance and stopped.

She could hear rain pouring down, but something felt off, like the sound was coming from far away, muffled by a layer of something. She realized that despite the darkness outside, no light at all was entering the corridor where windows should have been.

The moment Catherine realized this, the sound of something shaking the windows erupted. 

Thud. Thud. Thud. Thud.

Startled by the rapidly increasing noise, Catherine turned toward the source.

“Catherine.”

A gentle voice called her name. A flickering light shone from the far end of the corridor she had traversed. Amid the chaotic mixture of heavy rain, wind, and the strange black hands pounding on the windows, she heard footsteps approaching across the thick carpet. The faint presence felt heavy.

The footsteps suggested a wide stride. Something about it felt familiar, giving her a sense of déjà vu. Catherine stood still, holding her breath, waiting for the owner of those footsteps to appear.

The sounds from outside the window had ceased at some point. The wind whistled through the empty space. The pitch-black shadows that had fallen across everything gradually receded like clouds being pushed away.

Catherine held her breath as she watched the floor where a faint light was beginning to appear. 

It was reddish.

The flickering light was drawing closer. Finally, at the edge of her downcast vision, she saw the toe of a well-polished shoe. Catherine slowly raised her head.

A familiar face appeared. A bloodless, pale face with gaunt cheeks, a high collar that constricted his neck, and a neatly worn dark jacket…

Additionally wearing a thick winter coat that fell to his shins, Saul stood holding a lamp. His appearance in the flickering light was familiar.

Finally feeling safe, Catherine unconsciously sank to the floor, nearly collapsing.

Haah… With her long sigh of relief, her tensed shoulders finally relaxed. Using her hair that had fallen forward with her lowered shoulders as a shield, Catherine wiped her wet eyes. She took rapid breaths from within this cover.

She had been so startled that she could feel her heart beating rapidly. The pounding seemed to reverberate throughout her body.

“Are you all right?”

Slowly, the sound of Saul approaching reached her ears. The lamplight he carried fell near Catherine’s knees as she sat on the floor. Stepping into that light, Saul lowered himself. Bending his knee, he placed one on the floor and grasped Catherine’s hunched shoulders.

“Catherine.”

The gentle voice tickled her ear. Catherine suddenly felt something was off.

Unlike his soft tone, his movement as he lowered himself before Catherine seemed somehow jerky and unnatural.

She had the impression he was pretending to be relaxed, trying to hide his awkwardness. It was a strange… premonition. Her throat suddenly felt dry.

He didn’t seem like Saul. Though he clearly had Saul’s appearance and was certainly Saul, somehow Catherine couldn’t shake the feeling that the man before her wasn’t Saul. Her hands trembled.

Catherine unconsciously swallowed the dry saliva pooling in her mouth at the cold touch on her shoulders. The sound seemed excessively loud, breaking the quiet air.

“I didn’t mean to frighten you…”

There wasn’t even time to realize her mistake. The man before her seemed to notice that Catherine had sensed something. And he didn’t even try to hide it.

A hand in a pitch-black glove touched Catherine’s frozen cheek.

The man’s hand cupped her cheek and gently lifted it. Suddenly, the edge of a flash of light from somewhere in the building briefly fell over their heads before receding.

After brushing away Catherine’s hair that had stuck to her skin with cold sweat, the man quietly smiled, narrowing his eyes. Between those narrowed eyes, pupils darkened by the black shadows were visible.

The eyes reflecting the lamplight were a red… color.

“You…”

“At last we meet, Catherine.”

The faint words that escaped between her trembling lips were cut off before becoming a complete sentence. The man carefully grasped Catherine’s trembling hand and lifted it.

Like someone afraid of breaking something fragile, he pulled her hand toward him, handling it with utmost preciousness and affection.

Then, gazing into Catherine’s deep eyes that stared back at him, deathly pale, he pressed his cold lips against her knuckles.

Without removing his lips, the man smiled. The sensation of his thin lips stretching and curling upward between her firmly pressed knuckles was vivid, threatening to swallow even her pitiful trembling…

Catherine unconsciously inhaled. The sharp, fragmented breath brushed the inside of her nostrils. The shallow rising and falling of her breath continued rapidly, like her beating heart.

In the midst of the descended silence, all that could be heard was the flickering of the candle in the lamp and the sound of suppressed, rapid breathing.

The man moved languidly under Catherine’s fixed gaze. Removing those thin, cold lips, he turned Catherine’s hand over from showing the back to grasping it, and kissed deep into her curved palm.

The slowly advancing breath moistened the knuckles covering the man’s lips. It poured through the space between her thumb and index finger.

The man held Catherine’s gaze for a long time. His look was blind and dual-natured. It burned with desire, seeming ready to pull Catherine in and devour her whole, yet it also had a calculating quality, measuring whether to advance further or not.

Meeting that gaze, Catherine realized she must not hesitate. She curled her stiffly frozen fingertips and pulled back.

When Catherine moved to withdraw her captured hand, the man slowly released his grip. Though his grasp gradually loosened, suggesting he would let go willingly, an unmistakable reluctance dripped from the gesture.

A strange tension hung in the air, suggesting he might grab her fingertips again at any moment.

However, even as Catherine withdrew her hand and moved her body backward, away from him, the man simply continued to watch her. It was an exceptionally polite and gentlemanly attitude. 

Had it not been for that sticky, intense gaze fixed on Catherine, she might have thought so too.

“Do not be afraid, Catherine.”

The man’s voice mimicked Saul’s manner of speaking. With a face identical to Saul’s, he whispered in a voice exactly like his. But Catherine could tell.

This was not Saul.

The subtly jerky movements, that lust-soaked gaze fixed on Catherine, even the lingering attachment evident in every gesture… Facing this man whose entire being proclaimed he was not Saul, it was impossible not to notice.

Catherine belatedly blinked. Even in that brief moment, her eyes tensed, blinking rapidly for fear the man would immediately approach her.

Though the man made no direct threat to Catherine, his very existence felt threatening. This was likely because she recognized the man before her as the shabby, corpse-like man from outside the window during the storm.

It must have been because she recognized him as the evil thing Saul had warned her not to listen to.